City Journal
Nicole Gelinas
May 4, 2018
The Nashville Tennessean had some good news for its readers this week: AllianceBernstein (AB), a global money-management firm with nearly 3,500 employees and half a trillion dollars in assets, will bring 1,050 well-paying jobs to the capital of the Volunteer State. New Yorkers, though, could be forgiven for not realizing that Nashville’s gain was their loss; no New York newspaper prominently featured the story of a major investment firm forsaking Gotham for Music City. New Yorkers’ natural reaction, if they did hear of the news, might be: who needs ‘em, anyway? The city is already straining under a record population, record employment, and record tourism. Yet the reasons AB executives cited for the move should worry New York. New York is no longer a high-cost city with high-value amenities; rather, it is increasingly a high-cost city with low-value public services, most notably transportation infrastructure.
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https://www.city-journal.org/html/escape-new-york-15886.htmlWith "back office operations," Haslam is referring to the jobs that NYC financial institutions have been relocating since the 1960s, as advances in telecommunications allowed. From Fort Lauderdale to Sioux City, the lower cost of operations has made that worthwhile. This is different.